Volume 19, 2007

Editorial

Guy Judge

Department of Economics University of Portsmouth

E-mail: Guy.Judge@port.ac.uk .

Welcome to this issue of CHEER, which will be my last as
Editor. Earlier this year I decided that twenty-one years is
quite long enough for me to occupy this role, and that it is
time to hand things over to a younger person!

I won't bore you with too many reminiscences, but there
are a few points that I would like to make about CHEER's
development over the years. CHEER started out just as a
printed news and reviews sheet but has now developed
into what, I hope you will agree, is a proper journal.
Submitted papers are sent to referees for review and then
either rejected or accepted for publication with minor or
major amendments as necessary. Of course this prolongs
the publication process but leads to a higher quality of
material appearing in the journal.

Readers will notice that CHEER is now truly an international
journal. In this issue the authors of three of the papers are
based in the USA and we have one paper apiece from
authors in Australia, Japan and Greece. Other papers in
recent issues have come from Germany, Spain, Norway and
Qatar. This is greatly to be welcomed as it increases the
flow of knowledge across the world and opens us up to
new thinking and fresh ideas. Almost certainly this process
has been assisted by the publication of the journal online,
which has meant that CHEER has come to the attention of a
greater number of people in more and more countries.

However, the increasing number of submissions from
people from outside the UK seems to have been
accompanied by a reduction in the number of papers
coming from UK-based economists. I'm sure that this is not
because innovations in teaching and learning economics
with the assistance of ICT have died down in the UK so,
please, get to your keyboards and write some papers about
what you have been doing! If you have been using blogs,
podcasts or plagiarism analysis software like Turnitin, or
computers in parts of the economics curriculum not usually
associated with computer-based learning (for example, the
history of economic thought), or if you have been getting
students to author material for Wikipedia, you may have
some insights or results that the rest of us would find
interesting.